Flagged: The 1931 premiership medal.
By Noel Murphy
HISTORIC Cats football memorabilia is being snapped up by canny fans and collectors with a gold 1931 premiership medal recently sold at auction for $12,000.
Bob Troughton’s resplendent solid gold and blue enamel VFL medal was expected to fetch between $5000 and $7500 but surprised Charles Leski Auctions when it demonstrated the hot property Cats treasures have become among traders.
Gilt-edged members’ season tickets from the 1880s, rare but in poor condition, have drawn figures as high as $2700 of a base expectation of just $600.
More modest bargains can be snaffled for as little as a couple of hundred dollars.
Photos dated well back into the 1800s, in the pre-VFL/AFL days before Geelong were the Cats but a prodigious competitor with a fistful of premiership pennants to their credit.
Fancy your own 100-year-old photograph of Geelong’s footballers traipsing about the Blue Mountains in NSW?
Football immortal Charles Brownlow with his hands nonchalantly shoved in fob pockets and looking every bit the dapper Victorian gent?
Others in the touring Cats entourage make for respectable breed of tourist, dressed in ties, jackets, derbies and casual miner caps.
Could have all been yours – for just $225.
Likewise, Geelong runner K. McLaren’s life membership medal from 1955, badges to the Brownlow Young Memorial Stand, all manner of season tickets for members and ladies, fixture lists, postcard pictures, shots of the team in civvies, in horse-drawn carriages, supporters in grandstands – treasures all, for the dyed in the blue-and-white wool fan, and generally a few hundred dollars at most.
At these prices, it’s little surprise they didn’t last long.
